And the last platform on the web of any scale or influence is Google Search. And so, over time, webpages have become dramatically optimized for Google Search. And that means the kinds of things people write about, the containers that we write in, are mostly designed to be optimized for Google Search. They’re not designed for, “I need to just quickly tell you about this and move on.” Our little insight was, “Well, what if we just don’t do that? What if we only write for the people who come directly to our website instead of the people who find our articles through Search or Google Discover or whatever other Google platforms are in the world?” And so we just made these little blog posts, and the idea was, if you just come to our website one more time a day because there’s one more thing to look at that you’ll like, we will be fine.
And I think, if you look around the media landscape right now — we did that a year or so ago — more and more people are starting to realize, “Oh, we should just make the websites more valuable.” And the easiest way to make the websites more valuable is to have our talented people make more stories, and not just more stories but openly have more fun on the website. Business Insider is doing that. Semafor is doing that in other ways. And that’s what I mean, is, “Oh, if you start writing for other people, which is the heart of what a blog post really is: it’s you trying to entertain yourself and trying to entertain just a handful of other people, you’re going to go really much farther than trying to satisfy the robot.”
https://www.theverge.com/24087834/hank-green-decoder-podcast-google-youtube-web-media-platforms-distribution-future
That’s Nilay Patel responding to a question from Hank Green, on a podcast called Decoder. I haven’t listened to the episode, I read the transcript instead. The entire episode is worth a listen (or a read, if you share my preferences when it comes to consuming content), but this particular snippet jumped out at me, and for two different reasons.
The first is obvious for regular readers of this blog. If you are not relentlessly asking yourself what you’re optimizing for, you’re missing out. And Nilay applies this concept remarkably well here. Are you optimizing for reach and viewership? If so, you must make the Google bot happy when it trawls your website. You can call it whatever you like, and if you want to use jargon, call it SEO.
And when you write to make the bot happy, you may get more “hits”, sure. But the opportunity cost of those hits is a word that jumped out to me in Nilay’s answer. The opportunity cost of those hits is “fun”. You stop having fun when you write content that is optimized for someone else’s taste. The views on this blog, for example, aren’t the point of me writing daily on EFE. Having fun is – that’s what I am optimizing for, and I heartily recommend this approach to you.
Second, and this is a related point, it’s just fine to be a contrarian. You’ll meet lots of people who will tell you to do this, that and the other re: whatever it is that you are trying to do. They are well intentioned, these folks, and I am not for a moment saying that you should go against their advice for the sake of being a contrarian.
But I am saying that you should be optimizing for having fun. If your idea of having fun goes against their advice, and that ends up making you a contrarian in their eyes, well, more power to you.
“What are you optimizing for?” is a good question to ask, and if you are unsure of the answer to that question, optimize for having fun when you work. You may still fail (whatever your definition of success and failure) but hey, you will have had fun.
And isn’t that the point?
EconForEverybody 